CafeBpO

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Spanco BpO Misses Paying Salaries to Employees

Some time back we have posted about PC Care 247 in Gurgaon not paying salary of employees. Now if newspaper reports are to be believed another BpO company has not paid the salaries for its employees and this is for last 4 month. Unlike the one we talked about last time which was a rather unknown name like PC Care 247 this time it is a well known BpO company Spanco with thousands of employees in more than one city.

—As per the management of the company they are facing working capital issues due to which salaries are on hold. If the news reports are to be believed the company says they are facing payment issues from the government projects they are working on especially in the power sector. So it appears that the rot in power sector is slowly spreading to other industries also including the vendors that Power companies owned by government have hired. This kind of reminds me what Warren Buffet the legendary investor once said ” There is never only one cockroach in the kitchen”. If the power sector is in trouble it is spreading its problems to other sectors including BpO

The troubling part in this case is that Spanco is not a small company it employs thousands of people in many cities. Spanco is also listed on Mumbai and National Stock Exchange. Now if these thousands of people are not being paid salaries it will not be very long when a lot of them will be in job market to look for jobs. That will put a lot of pressure on the job market and may depress the wages in the short term. We all know similar thing happened when Satyam employees were leaving in hordes during time of the Satyam financial scam. It is in everybody’s interest that the issue is resolved and employees are paid ASAP.

The other big problem with a large company like Spanco not paying salaries of employees creates bad reputation for the whole BpO sector both for potential clients outside of India and potential bright employees in India. If more companies start missing salaries of employees one wonders how BpO will fare as career choice for future employees.

Please check the link here to read more about the issue in Times of India online by clicking here

We are planning to do a series on some of these things and would love to hear from you. Please use Contact CafeBpoform to get in touch with us if you would like to contribute content for CafeBpO do check our guest post guidelines before sending your post.

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It is not a good idea to Blast your resume to 5000 consultants.

Wait and think before you blast your resume to those 5000 recruiters. Let us give you some reasons why it is not a very good idea. But before that what resume blast is all about.

There are websites that for a fee (anywhere between 300-5000 INR), claim that they will send your resume to thousands of recruiters and then you just have to sit by phone and pick and choose job offers (and pigs can fly). Let us give some reasons why we believe it is not a very good idea.

Any mail campaign that blasts your resume in thousands of emails is considered SPAM which is 4 letter word. So in majority of cases these resumes will end up in SPAM or Junk folder, never to be seen by anybody. Ever wondered why SPAM and JUNK both have 4 letters?

Even if say 1 in thousand CV reaches a human, the moment the recruiter realizes you have been blasting your resume they will see only one word “Desperate” and chances of your resume getting further attention will vanish.

Who knows who these consultants are in which city, if they are active, or do they even operate in your industry. What use you have of a consultant in Kolkata working for say Industrial clients when you are looking for a job in Bangalore in a BpO?

Now let us look at the other scenario that somehow your resume reaches thousands of consultants and they start sending to all the companies that are there clients. Very soon your resume will be with every company and the consultants will also realize it, hence they will stop pushing it as the general feeling about your resume would be “ It must already be with them, hence I will not get my professional fees”

So as we have seen it is a no win situation for you as a candidate in both scenarios when your resume reaches to thousands of consultants or when it lands in the SPAM or JUNK folder.

Are there better strategies to make your candidature stand out than to blast your resume or spamming? Yes there are and we will talk about them in a future post. Do let us know what you think about this post and also what your opinion about résumé blasting service is.

We are planning to do a series on some of these things and would love to hear from you. Please use Contact CafeBpoform to get in touch with us if you would like to contribute content for CafeBpO do check our guest post guidelines before sending your post.

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So You Want To Write A Guest Blog Post For CafeBpO ?

We are glad you are visiting this post, it clearly shows you are interested in contributing to the growth of CafeBpO community about Business, Career and Life in BpO.

We published our first expert author post by Information security expert Surinder Singh Rait, and we plan to continue to do so and involve more and more readers and contributors to the CafeBpO community.

We encourage our readers to write guest post on CafeBpO, both by expert authors as well as other bloggers. Here are the guidelines for the same

The topic should touch some aspect of Business, Career and Life in BpO like your story, a topic you are expert on e.g. Six sigma, Information Security, transition, recruitment etc.

It should be original and written by you, please do not submit posts that are copied from internet, as we use automated tools to check if the content submitted for the post is original.

Credit: CafeBpO respects individual work and if your idea is derivative of someone else work, feel free to give credit. Same goes to images which you use in your post.

Article Quality: Article should be of 600-1500 words and should cover the topic in detail. For any post that covers the business or career aspect of BpO please submit only after thorough research. If your post is more than 1500 words we encourage you to split it in two.

Pictures + Video+ Slides: We encourage you to add pictures, slides, presentations and video created by you for the posts. Please ensure you are not submitting somebody else’s work and the material have not been copied from Internet either willingly or subconsciously.

Author Profile: Please submit a good photograph of yourself with a small bio. Also send us the link to your social profile like LinkedIn, Facebook which you want to appear in your bio.

Copyright: We want only original content on CafeBpO. In case it is discovered that you have copied post from somewhere. This will lead to instant ban and removal of all your blog posts, and profile from CafeBpO. Also by publishing a post on CafeBpO, you give CafeBpO the copyright ownership of the post.

Check List Before you submit the post to be published on CafeBpO

Is the post original and written by you

Are there any media like pictures, video etc with the same? If yes is the media created by you.

If the media is not created by you the do you have written permission of its owner to publish it, or if the media is part of Creative Commons Licence have you followed all the steps in CC licence?

Have you and proof read the post for typos and errors?

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To submit posts please use Contact CafeBpO form to get in touch with us.

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Human Aspect of Information Security Policy in Service Industry

In my 14 years of experience in the service sector industry where we have served almost all the markets globally as a country, I have observed that there has been tremendous focus on tools and technologies in which we try to fix the security loopholes by implementing various detective/ corrective/ preventive tools. But organizations usually miss that these tools don’t have any artificial intelligence to take subjective decisions as to who is right and who is wrong.

If any employee has intention to do some malicious activity then one usually finds a way to do so by bypassing various automated controls by means of social engineering. Wikipedia defines Social Engineering as: “the act of manipulating people into performing actions or divulging confidential information. While similar to a confidence trick or simple fraud, the term typically applies to trickery or deception for the purpose of information gathering, fraud, or computer system access; in most cases the attacker never comes face-to-face with the victim.”

Hence it doesn’t mean that tools are useless, but the only thing which we miss is that these tools are operated by humans. It is very important for an organization/ senior management to strategize and keep into consideration that how to motivate their employees to avoid having any disgruntled employees within the organization.

Losses occurred by insiders is more as compared to outsiders. We have to make appropriate plans to educate the employees on an ongoing basis to tell them as to what is right v/s what is wrong. The consequences of getting into the wrong behavior has to be properly communicated with examples.

Following 5 steps can be taken to ensure coverage of human aspect:

1.Proper awareness plan
There has to be proper plan in place as to what to do prior to employment, during employment and post employment. Employees must know their rights as to what are they supposed to do and what their boundaries.

2.Drafting appropriate disciplinary policy and educating employees on that
Disciplinary action is very good example of perfect governance within an organization. It should be drafted in such a manner that without any bias any employee gets a clear message that by indulging into following activities these are the consequences that one may have to face.

3.Appropriate detective controls in place to send a clear message to employees that each and every act of there is under surveillance
Here organizations should have appropriate detective controls in place to make sure that the management is aware of what is happening where or in other word we can say that we should know who is doing what and where. This should be communicated to all employees as part of our awareness plan so that they know that every act of theirs is being monitored. Tools like SIEM, log management tools and now a day’s NAC and DLP tools are few examples which security teams within the organization would like to strategize in their annual budget if they do not have one.

4.Setting up the right tone by taking appropriate action if any non compliance is found
While monitoring, if any employee is found in any malicious activity then appropriate action need to be initiated without looking into the respective employees band or position within the organization. This has been mostly seen that mostly organization have wonderful drafted policies and procedures but the differentiator is how it has been implemented at the ground level. This gives a straight message within the organization from bottom to top that no one will be spared irrespective of any position they hold and in the interest of the organization’s reputation any non compliance will be dealt with seriously.

5.Rewarding employees found adhering to such policies to motivate others following these steps
This is one of the key aspects of human nature. Employees must be motivated/ rewarded based on their act or adherence to organization’s policy which should be measurable in a SMART way. Ideally within the KRA there must be one area which should be linked to adherence to organization’s information security policy and efforts to improve the overall Info Sec culture. With this we can straight away differentiate employees who are keen on improving the culture within the organization whom we can reward appropriately.

Views mentioned here are solely author’s independent and are not related or linked to any organizations or to CafeBpO

Brief Author Profile:

Surinder Singh Rait a seasoned information security professional currently is working with Birlasoft India Limited as Information Security and Data Privacy Leader. With about 14 years of experience in various roles where he has implemented Enterprise Information Security Framework and did consulting for many fortune customers in implementing ISMS, Enterprise Risk Services and various IS related technologies and solutions. As part of his past experience, he have worked very closely with senior management and CXO teams to ensure clean implementation of IT Governance framework meeting client and various global regulations and framework in a very cost-effective manner.

We would like to thank Surinder Singh Rait to contribute to CafeBpO, he is the first independent expert author to contribute to CafeBpO, if you would also like to contribute as an expert author then please Contact CafeBpO form to get in touch with us if you would like to contribute content for CafeBpO

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We saw in the earlier post that due to irregular shifts a lot of BpO and Call Center employees are unable to sleep properly leading to a variety of health problems. But since most of us do not have the luxury to change our shift we need to ensure we get a good workaround to get a good night or should we dare say a good day’s sleep?

Let us give us some things that you can do to get a good sleep even during the day. The points are based on our discussion with some people who are working in the BpO and Call Center business for many years.

Trying to sleep- pic by “D Sharon Pruitt”

Consistency: Try to sleep at the same time every day. Even if you reach home early or have nothing to do, wait for your regular time to sleep and only then go to bed.

Befriend the Dark Side: Make sure your room has thick curtains and no light sneaks in, as a double precaution cover your eyes with eye pads like they give you in long haul flights. Remember even when your eyes are closed they can still sense light leading to less than optimal sleep so your aim should be to give them complete darkness when you are sleeping.

Switch off the Cell phone: If you work in a voice process and still want to take calls after night shift we salute you. But if you are like the rest of us who have had enough after the shift, switch off that cell phone or give it to a family member who can announce your beauty sleep to the callers. Come on even President Obama sleeps with all the problems of the world he is supposed to solve, so the world will not miss you if you miss some calls.

Avoid Caffeine: The earlier your last dose of caffeine is before you go to bed the better are your chances to get a sound sleep. Remember you drink tea or coffee to stay awake in night, so just do the opposite when you want to sleep. Have your last sip of coffee/tea a minimum 2 hours before the bed time. Also what you need to remember is tea and coffee are not the only beverages with sleep killer chemicals your cold drinks and energy drinks are also buzzing with sleep killing demons. Some people swear by some herbal teas that help in sleeping, but we have not tried them so would not comment about the same.

Eat light: While it is tough to sleep on an empty stomach, it is tougher to sleep on a stuffed stomach. So before bed time make sure there is some gap between your last meal and nap time. You can have a light snack if you feel hungry but do not stuff yourself, it will only increase your weight and decrease your sleep.

Exercise regularly: If your body is physically exerted your chances of a good sleep increases exponentially. You don’t have to exercise before bed, but any time during the day if you have done some workout like walking, running, weight training or simple climbing of stairs, your body will want to recover, and we all know body recovers when we are sleeping.

Read a Book: Remember when we were in school and the thought of reading itself use to make us yawn? Try something similar take a book to bed, just ensure it is not a stomach churning murder mystery, try a book on politics or history they are known to be the best sleep inducing invention of mankind.

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Bonus tip: No TV while in bed, yes as with the remote you will be compelled to keep on flipping the channel and will not sleep.

These 7 Steps to get a good sleep after night shift may seem simple and commonsense but a lot of us do not implement them. Do try them and inform us if they have helped you in any form. Also if you have any tip of your own please write to us.

Its easier to sleep in dark

pic byVicente Alfonso

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10 Problems due to lack of Sleep in BpO employees

Today getting a good night’s sleep is a luxury for most of us, what with late night work, idiot box, chatting on social media websites, neighborhood Jaagrans( whole night Bollywood songs parody to please gods), sound pollution etc.

Contrary to what doctor say that one needs a good 8 hours sleep to be healthy in the long run, most of us are lucky if we get even 5-6 hours of sleep. Unfortunately lack of sleep in BpO employees is a reality that they have to live with.

Things become trickier if you work for an International BpO and have a shift job that is against your biological rhythm. Though well-known let us still repeat some of the ill effects of lack of sleep

Reduced cognitive ability leading to making mistakes while working and dangerous while driving.

This problem is aggravated if you live with friends who have different shifts and also if your shift keeps on changing on a regular basis. If your shift changes regularly then you have a bigger problem. As by the time your body is used to current shift, it is time to move on to the next shift. This kind of reminds me of Jet lag on short trips to US, by the time your body is used to the new time zone; it is time to travel again. L

Dear reader we would like to know what your experience is about lack of sleep due to shift work in BpO companies. Have you experienced any of the problems associated with lack of sleep? Or you have no issues due to the same.

So what do you do to cope up with lack of sleep and adjust to change in shift timings to get a good Day’s sleep in your case. Everybody has their own way of dealing with the same, let us hear from you what you do and we will consolidate the same and publish here on CaféBpO

Please use Contact CafeBpO form to get in touch with us if you would like to contribute content for CafeBpO

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Are your Ready for Income Tax 2012-13

Once the festivities of welcoming New Year are over, January becomes a painful month for most people who are salaried. As a lot of employees in BPO companies are new and this could be their first year of generating income they are not well versed with the income tax laws and provisions.

A lot of us keep on ignoring the mails from HR and/ or Finance to submit proof of investment and rent etc. and then when the tax is deducted in the January Salary we get a rude shock.

Income Tax Department

This week should be the last week in most cases when you can submit the proof for your investments and other tax saving instruments to your company.

Here are the steps to follow

Find out your salary (Not kidding a lot of first time salary earners have no idea what is taxable and what is not taxable in their salary).

You need not read further if your net income is less than 2Lakhs as income till 2 Lakhs is exempt from Income tax. If you are a senior citizen and reading this blog then your income up to 2.5 Lakhs is exempt from Income tax. Check here for your income tax slab.

In most cases your company will have either an internal or external salary portal that will give you access to your Tax details go please log in to that to find your tax liability.

Go online and check tax deducted till date. You can check it here by going on this link. You will need user ID and password. Or if you have online banking for banks like HDFC, ICICI, Axis, SBI etc. their website will also give you a link

Now that you know what is your tax liability and how much tax has been deducted you will need to provide proof of investments photocopy attached in a prescribe form that your company would have circulated.

Once you have submitted the proofs to the payroll team of your company, check your pay slip at the end of month to ensure no extra tax has been deducted, as human errors are always possible.

Given below are some of the investments that can help you save tax

Most Insurance policies both LIC and other private companies

Rent paid to landlord by check. Remember your parents can be your landlord but not your husband or wife.

Principal up to 20K and interest up to 1.5Lakh in case of a self occupied property.

Some specific Fixed Deposits with banks

Tax saving Mutual funds.

National Savings certificate

Public Provident fund

So dear reader if you have been ignoring your tax planning for the financial year 2012-13 this is high time you put your house in order get in touch with your payroll team and follow these basic steps.

Also please remember these are some very basic steps for detailed financial planning you should consult a certified financial planner or your tax consultant.

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Get News About BpO From CafeBpO Online Paper

Dear Readers now getting news about BpO is very easy. As part of continuing improvement and enhanced reader experience we are happy to announce that we will be circulating a weekly online 100% FREE paper from CafeBpO. This paper will not only be from authors of CafeBpO but also from other sources from the internet like

New York Times

Economic Times

CNN

Newsweek

Reuters

and many other online resources.

There are many benefits for our readers of the same e.g.

You get a single source to gather all the news happening in the world of BpO at a single place

All latest trends, news, deals would be available to you at a click of mouse

As this is a weekly paper even if you have missed something you know where to go to get all the information you are looking for

We will be collecting news from sources across the globe you can be assured to get diverse point of views about the business of BpO

It is 100% free with no obligation to purchase anything.

The paper will be available online every week on Tuesday around 4 pm India time (+5:30 GMT). In order to not miss it you can subscribe to the same by clicking the subscribe button on the paper or you can also subscribe to CafeBpo blog to receive it as we will be inserting it in posts on regular basis. Here is the link to the Online Paper of CafeBpO. Below is the screen shot of the first edition of the Free Online Paper giving you news about BpO.

Subscribe to CafeBpO Online Paper

If you have liked this article feel free to share with your friends, and colleagues on your social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn , Twitter etc. If you would like to receive regular updates from CafeBpO please use the subscribe by email option on this page (We do not sell, rent or donate your email address to spammers). You can also get in touch with us using the Contact CafeBpO form in case you have any suggestions or would like to contribute to the CafeBpO blog.

—Almost all the BPO companies hire freshers from various colleges. A lot of time friends in college join the same company. Now suddenly from just being buddies they are colleagues which mean life is different. Even though you are in same company and have been buddies for a long time now a new dimension to the relationship is added called coworker or colleagues. Now you both may have joined same company and even in same team but still you may be given different salaries for various reasons. Most freshers are curious to know the salary of their friends. One of the first questions that the buddies ask each other is “What is your Salary?”

Although the HR team normally will inform the candidates that your salary is confidential and are not to be shared but the buddies just ignore it and have a high tendency to share their salary with their friends. This leads to many problems both for the company as well as for the friends.

Let us address this post to candidates and why they should not worry about the salaries of others

The first reason is that all companies consider it to be a breach of confidentiality between employee and organization and take strict action including termination of somebody who shares his or her salary.

Every employee even in the same process can be given different salary based on the performance in the interview, qualification, prior experience or even the negotiation skills of the individual.

You accepted the salary at the time of joining and nobody has forced you to join the company so now there is no reason you should be unhappy about the same.

If you ask the salary of other person she may ask your salary and now you have to think if you want to share the same. Remember there are no free lunches in this world.

What is the guarantee that the other person is telling you the truth, now you may be upset based on a lie told to you. Why even go that path?

Remember asking or telling salary to your colleagues is not only rude it is considered a breach of contract by your employer so why go that path. Your salary is confidential so is your colleagues, and it will bring more harm to you than benefit to know salary of the next guy.

It is best to only know your own salary and the growth opportunities your company offers to employees and work towards them. If you get the promotion or higher responsibilities you will automatically get a higher salary.

We are planning to do a series on some of these things and would love to hear from you. Please use Contact CafeBpo form to get in touch with us if you would like to contribute content for CafeBpO

If you have liked this article feel free to share with your friends, and colleagues on your social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn , Twitter etc. If you would like to receive regular updates from CafeBpO please use the subscribe by email option on this page (We do not sell, rent or donate your email address to spammers)

Our Experience in Interviewing Fresh MBA Graduates

—In the course of interviewing fresher’s one comes across a lot of youngsters who are about to enter the job market. We have always enjoyed interacting with them as they bring a fresh dose of energy to the organization.Unfortunately a lot of fresher’s we meet have absolutely no idea what they are doing or even what they are studying and why. Our experience has been that out of 100 candidates we meet only about 10% are worth hiring.Without any prejudice let us give some examples below of some real life interview candidates, most of them from local B schools where they have shelled anywhere between 4 to 12 lakhs to get 3 alphabets MBA.

But it seems these MBA from local colleges are not of much use as most of the students we have met had no clue what they studied and they were appearing for interview for just to check the options without any clue what a BFSI BPO is all about. Most of them were actually not even ready with a proper CV before appearing for the interview. One wonders what the placement office of these colleges was doing.

As an experiment we decided to ask questions only related to the project the candidate submitted in in MBA and below are some examples

a) The first prize went to the candidate who said “Was it not abolished when computers came as with computers there was no need to do double entry as they are very accurate!”

We can go on and on but the idea is not to make fun of anybody but to highlight the pathetic state our private MBA colleges are in and what kind of education they are providing to the youngsters. But the problem is not with the Fresh MBA Graduates it is with the education system and the private colleges who are not interested in long-term success of their students and only want to collect fees.

Most of these private MBA colleges do not have proper faculty or curriculum and the aim is to get as many students as possible and take the fees from them. Only today we were checking the headlines that 99% of school teachers fail the test for Central Teachers Eligibility test. If that is the state of primary school teachers one can imagine the condition other private institutions will be in.

Without going into much detail if you are a youngster who wants to enroll into one of the private MBA college and going to pay around 3-5 Lakh Rupees in Fees and other expenses and then after two year you will be applying for jobs that pay you 2.5 lakhs per annum then you need to do your ROI and see if the MBA school is worth applying to?

It will take 2+ years just to get your money back that provided you are able to get a job based on that private local MBA you paid for.

So our dear reader it is very important that before you apply for private MBA schools and shell out lakhs of rupees either from your parents or from taking a student loan from a bank do some calculations and check the past record for the MBA School in placement.

Please do note that we are all for higher studies specially MBA but from a college that will not only offer you a good placement but will also help you learn in those two precious years of your life. IF your aim is only to get a degree without any learning then we have nothing to offer you just like the B school who have sent some of these candidates to us. (Though reading CafeBpO does not costs anything J

We are planning to do a series on some of these things and would love to hear from you. Please use Contact CafeBpo form to get in touch with us if you would like to contribute content for CafeBpO

If you have liked this article feel free to share with your friends, and colleagues on your social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn , Twitter etc. If you would like to receive regular updates from CafeBpO please use the subscribe by email option on this page (We do not sell, rent or donate your email address to spammers)